Many studies indicated that industrialization and urbanization caused serious soil heavy metal pollution from industrialized age. However, fewer previous studies have conducted a combined analysis of the landscape pattern, urbanization, industrialization, and heavy metal pollution. This paper was aimed at exploring the relationships of heavy metals in the soil (Pb, Cu, Ni, As, Cd, Cr, Hg, and Z...

Patterns of soil organic carbon (SOC) vary widely across the landscape leading to large uncertainties in the SOC budget especially for agricultural landscapes where water, tillage and wind erosion redistributes soil and SOC across the landscape. It is often assumed that soil erosion results in a loss of SOC from the agricultural ecosystem but recent studies indicate that soil erosion and its su...

Few studies describe root distributions at the species level in diverse forests, although belowground species interactions and traits are often assumed to affect fine-root biomass (FRB). We used molecular barcoding to study how FRB of trees relates to soil characteristics, species identity, root diversity, and root traits, and how these relationships are affected by proximity to ecotones in a t...

Examples from the Murray–Darling basin in Australia are used to illustrate different methods of disaggregation of reconnaissance-scale maps. One approach for disaggregation revolves around the de-convolution of the soil–landscape paradigm elaborated during a soil survey. The descriptions of soil map units and block diagrams in a soil survey report detail soil–landscape relationships or soil top...

The variability in the net ecosystem exchange of carbon (NEE) is a major source of uncertainty in quantifying global carbon budget and atmospheric CO2. Soil respiration, which is a large component of NEE, could be strongly influential to NEE variability. Vegetation type, landscape position, and site history can influence soil properties and therefore drive themicrobial and root production of so...

Ecologists are beginning to recognize the effect of heterogeneity on structure and function in arid and semiarid ecosystems. Additionally, the influences of temperature on ecosystems are widely documented, but landscape temperature patterns and relationships with vegetation are rarely reported in ecological studies. To better understand the importance of temperature patterns to the conservation...

1 The western corn rootworm (WCR), Diabrotica virgifera virgifera Leconte (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), creates economic and environmental concerns in the Corn Belt region of the U.S.A. To supplement the population control tactics of the Areawide Pest Management Program in Brookings, South Dakota, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) were used to examine the spatial relationships from 1997 to ...